This is an excerpt of an article that is printed in the November/December 2003 Issue

VirTra Systems: The first 360° Use-of-Force Simulator for Law Enforcement

According to the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program, from 1992 to 2001, 594 law enforcement officers were shot and killed in the line of duty. A staggering 22.5% of these brave officers were shot in the back of the body. This statistic results from a combination of factors, including the natural human response to turn one’s back toward an imminent, overwhelming threat, and an ambush of the officer from behind. In many of these scenarios, training can literally make the difference between surviving the critical incident or not. Because of this, every firearms instructor should teach officers to expand their awareness of their entire environment.

It has recently been reported that when an officer’s attention is split, while under extreme stress, his response ability is impaired and trigger-pull time is increased (Lewinski & Hudson, 2003). Effective training can counteract this deadly process, and can be greatly enhanced by a 360-degree threat training environment with stressors and distractions that more precisely duplicate the real world.

Aggressive posturing during these critical scenarios – designed to throw-off the perpetrator – is one of several recommended procedures to counteract this threat. However, an officer must overcome his natural responses to correctly react in these situations. Appropriate use-of-force is no accident. It comes from repetitive drills, realistic training, and cutting-edge technology. These skills must be finely honed.

Until recently, nearly all law enforcement officers trained on two-dimensional, flat screen devices. However, VirTra Systems, Inc. of Arlington, Texas, has recently unveiled its new IVR™ series line of 360° situational awareness and judgmental use-of-force training simulators for law enforcement and security agencies. With over 10 years of virtual reality development experience, these simulators allow the trainee to be placed inside a 360° immersive virtual reality™ environment, using his own weapon. Trainees can actually respond to situations that are closer to real-life than ever before. VirTra Systems has even incorporated real-world smells to enhance the realism!

“I have been studying the biomechanical, psychological, and performance aspects of officer-involved shootings for over a quarter of a century,”commented Dr. Bill Lewinski, professor of law enforcement at Minnesota State University, Mankota. “In that time, some glaring but simple truths have revealed themselves. The most obvious is that the better an officer is trained for an encounter and the closer that training is to an actual situation he may face in the street, the better that officer’s performance is when it really counts. VirTra Systems’ virtual reality, total immersion system is not ‘state of the art.’ IT IS THE ART. It promises the most dynamic and realistic training of any simulator. Out of all of the systems available, VirTra Systems’ has the greatest potential to save officer’s lives by actually shaping and conditioning their judgments and responses in a realistic format that is unparalleled in its ability to replicate the reality of lethal force street encounters,” concluded Dr. Lewinski.